Machine translation of text from one natural language to another has become a routine functionality that may be used many times each day by users of devices such as desktop computers, personal computers and hand-held devices such as mobile phones. In the ever-growing global marketplace, vendors and developers may communicate regularly with customers and employers who speak different languages, and machine translation systems may aid in converting a communication document from the native natural language of its author to one or more target natural languages of its intended recipients.
Many languages include an alphabet associated with a script that may cause difficulties for users in finding appropriate keyboards to support typing messages or documents. If keyboards supporting such alphabets/scripts are commercially available, potential users frequently do not have easy access to purchase or use them. Transliterated text may thus be typed into a document using a keyboard that is available to a user (e.g., an available English keyboard may be used to type in transliterated Arabic characters), and the user may then communicate by either sending the transliterated text to intended recipients, or may employ a transliteration engine to convert the transliterated text into characters that may be recognized as alphabetic characters of the source language. Thus, for example, if a native speaker of Arabic can only type sufficiently fast using an English keyboard, he/she may be able to type messages or documents as transliterated Arabic text on an English keyboard, and request that the entire message or document be converted to Arabic.